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Pour over

A slow-drip cup made to order in three minutes. Pick your bean and they’ll grind it, place it in a filter-lined ceramic funnel and pour on near-boiling water. The rich, smooth coffee drips into a cup below the funnel.

Bay area natives Salpi Sleiman and Jenna Woodruff opened top-rated Roast Coach — billed as the city’s first pour over mobile coffee bar — 13 months ago outside North Park’s Sea Rocket Bistro (where they’re both servers). Sleiman says there’s a science to pour over coffee, especially when it’s served outdoors. In cold weather, the grind must be changed to keep the water from cooling too much during the drip process. Moisture can also affect the flavor (they buy their beans from Revolution Roasters). Business is booming. There are now Roast Coach carts downtown and in Hillcrest, and plans for up to 20 more by the end of 2014. Also popular with coffee lovers is Dark Horse Coffee, a roaster/pour over cafe that opened three months ago in Normal Heights.

Seasonality

Selling coffee beans only in the seasons that they’re harvested, to ensure peak freshness.

Coffee crops are harvested at different times in different countries. Patton at Bird Rock said he just rolled out Bolivian coffee beans, but South American beans won’t arrive until late summer. Coffee drinkers tend to like the same thing every morning, but Patton said roasters are working hard to educate consumer palates to recognize seasonality, just as produce buyers do at farmers markets. “Coffee companies can get lazy and keep buying green bean coffee from brokers in Guatemala all year long, but some of those beans could be a year old, and they’ll taste a lot flatter than they did when they were harvested eight or nine months before,” he said.

Single origin

The name for coffee beans that can be traced to a single coffee farm, or — in a low-producing country like Ethiopia — to a single mill.

The benefit of single-origin beans to the coffee drinker is flavor. “It’s all about nuance,” said Scheibe at Revolution Roasters. “Single-origin coffee can have very floral notes that you wouldn’t find in a blended coffee.” Because single-origin beans have a delicate flavor, they are generally roasted lightly to preserve flavor. Scheibe’s single-origin beans include Zapatista from Oaxaca, Dancing Goat from Ethiopia and, Black Bird from Hueheutenango.

Cold brewing

A slow-drip process where cold water percolates through coarsely ground coffee for 8 to 12 hours for a smooth, rich cup of iced coffee.

At Cafe Moto, Lee sells about 4 to 5 gallons of cold-brewed, iced coffee a day. The Kyoto brewers look like a mad scientist’s contraption, with cold water dripping at a rate of just one drop every 40 seconds. They also use the Toddy cold brew method that can make 5 gallons of cold, strong coffee concentrate overnight. Because heat never touches the beans, the result is a coffee that’s smoother and more big-bodied. “If you use water that’s too hot, you scald the coffee and bring out the tannins and phosphorus. You don’t get the sweetest, juiciest, most wonderful flavor that you can from the bean,” he said.